2012 Presentations (Communicative Events)
"Google, and Twitter, and Bitly—oh my!": Novel Approaches to Repository Collection Development
In order to capitalize on the recent increase in traffic to Academic Commons, the digital research repository of Columbia University and its affiliates, we have implemented a couple of new collection development strategies that focus on faculty who are strongly motivated to enhance their visibility on the Web. The first is using a set of weekly Google Alerts and RSS feeds to track mentions of Columbia researchers in the news media. We then contact them with a customized outreach message inviting them to deposit their work. We also tweet about new content added in this way. The second is emailing Columbia researchers a monthly usage report for their content detailing how many times each of their works in the repository has been viewed and downloaded, both that past month, and over their lifetime. This report also includes a link to our newly designed self-deposit form, thereby providing a gentle, but regular, reminder to faculty about the value of adding their work to the repository. The third is to further enhance the visibility of Academic Commons content by faculty in the news by coining a Bit.ly URL that points to a dynamically-generated search results page for their content and then using Twitter to push that URL out to relevant Twitter feeds, including the faculty member's and those of the department or center with which they are affiliated. We also use hashtags to take advantage of the additional boost to visibility that they can provide. Together these efforts have proved highly successful at motivating faculty to deposit their work in an ongoing fashion: every week we identify a dozen or more researchers and anywhere from a third to half respond by depositing work in the repository; every month over 1,000 email stats reports go out and, as a result, dozens of new items are deposited; several times a week we tweet about this content, generating hundreds of additional pageviews and downloads every month.
Subjects
Files
- Hilliker_SPARC_IF_Poster.pdf application/pdf 1.21 MB Download File
More About This Work
- Academic Units
- Libraries and Information Services
- Libraries
- Published Here
- May 23, 2012
Notes
Presented at the SPARC 2012 Open Access meeting as part of the Innovation Fair: http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/oa12/. Published in Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 1(1):eP1042, http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/9/.